The pitch here wasn't that only a few people get a vote, it was that the people making the decisions aren't aware of how "the wider world" works. And they are, clearly. The people making Chrome/Firefox and the people running the CAs every publicly-trusted site uses are aware of what their products do, and how they are used.

It’s capped to 15 years.

In another comment someone linked to a document from the Chrome team.

Here’s a quote that I found interesting:

“In Chrome Root Program Policy 1.5, we landed changes that set a maximum ‘term-limit’ (i.e., period of inclusion) for root CA certificates included in the Chrome Root Store to 15 years.

While we still prefer a more agile approach, and may again explore this in the future, we encourage CA Owners to explore how they can adopt more frequent root rotation.”

https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/moving-forw...

> So no one that actually has to renew these certificates.

I believe google, who maintain chrome and are on the CAB, are an entity well known for hosting various websites (iirc, it's their primary source of income), and those websites do use https

It's almost like the threat models for CA and leaf certs are different.

> You're kidding, right? You've never seen a server completely inaccessible just because the owner had trouble renewing the cert?

I am not kidding, but also the rest of your comment isn’t at all related to what I said.